ORICL Panel: Wheat Community, Part 2

ORICL Panel, Part 2: Wheat Community
“The Way We Were: Pre-Oak Ridge and Early Oak Ridge”
Interviewed by Patricia Clark
Transcribed by Jordan H. Reed
July 10, 2000
[Note: This was a video tape received from the American Museum of Science and Energy.]
Patricia Clark: When a new place is to be built, the first thing that must be done is to be rid of the old place, even though all buildings are removed the impression already made on the people who lived in the old place cannot be erased. These people go to live at another place, but they are still what they were. They become a part of their new community and add to that community those characteristics “left over” from the place that is gone. Good morning! This is the second in our series on “The Way We Were: Pre-Oak Ridge and early Oak Ridge”. I am Pat Clark, the coordinator of the program for ORICL. What I just read to you is from the forward to a book, “We’ll Call it Wheat”, by Dorathy Moneymaker, and Dorathy is one of our guests this morning. When the Army came in 1942, with the Manhattan Project, one thousand families on 56,000 plus acres had to be moved. Just one half of those acres were in Roane County, the area where K-25 and X-10 are now. Of the people who were ordered to leave on very short notice, Congressman Jennings tried to render some help, and in a telegram to President Roosevelt, and you have a copy of that in the hand-out this morning, that was a telegram that is in the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authorities] archives, pleaded that “their plight is desperate”. Payment and aid were urgently needed for relocation. Today, we are going to hear from some of those people, those families who had to leave from the Wheat Community in Roane County in early 1943. Next week our session will be on the Anderson County Communities vacated by the project. Who were these people from Wheat? They were Gallahers, Sellers, Moneymakers, Magills, Watsons, Driscolls, McKinneys, Stoneciphers, to name just a few, and we have representatives from those families with us today. Now I am going to ask our panelists to briefly identify themselves, so that you will know who they are and I am going to start with Don, who is at the far right. Don-
Don Watson: My name is Don Watson. I grew up in the Wheat Community and my family had been there since 1830. Five generations of our family had lived in the same home, which was taken over by Oak Ridge. And I left before that happened. I left in 1942 as I was in the service and I missed what went on and my father had died in ’39 and my mother had to move to Harriman. When I came back, the people were dispersed in various areas, and it was quite a chore to catch up with where they were. And of course when I came back from the service in ’46, I lived in Harriman a while and moved to Knoxville, and now I live in Maryville, where I operated a business for the past 38 years until I retired as a young man at about 80 years old. (Laughter)
Dorathy Moneymaker: If he thinks 80 is young, he ought to be 85 like I am. (Laughter) I want to tell you, my people had lived in the Wheat section for four generations. I don’t mean Moneymakers, they were new people. They just lived there 10 years, but I want to tell you a funny thing. It wasn’t funny when I happened, but it was funny. We didn’t get out in time and we were suppose to be out by the last day of ’42. They came to evict us, and the man come up to the door and he wanted to know where my husband was, and I said he was at work. He was already working up here in Oak Ridge, and he said, “Well, I come to evict, serve eviction papers on you, so I’ll just serve them on you”. Now, I was expecting our first baby, and he was born on the fourteenth day of January in 1943, and he weighed well over eight pounds. So, you know very good and well I was showing. I stepped back and I said to him, “Did you know that there is a law in the state of Tennessee that will not allow you to evict a pregnant woman?” And he was so amazed, he almost stepped off the front porch. He never did come back. I didn’t know that there was a law and I just made it up, but come to find out there was one. But we didn’t get out until April of ’43, and as I told you that child was born on the fourteenth of January. You know where Blair Road is? Ok. We went down to Blair Road to where the gate was and I was in labor. We started to Harriman Hospital and the man at the gate wanted to see my card. I didn’t have one and so they wouldn’t let me through and me in labor now mind you. And so, they let my husband through because he had one. (Laughter) He went to Oliver Springs and got a doctor and brought him down there and let me go with him, let me go with the doctor, but the doctor was so uneasy that he brought his nurse with him when he come. But we got to the Harriman Hospital. I could tell you some worse things than that, but I better hush. (Laughter)
Bill Driscoll: I’m Bill Driscoll. Family of course of the Driscoll and of the Hembry’s and a lot of these people know them. I was 12 years old and what I want to talk about later, and Patricia said we’ll get a chance to talk some later, is I think Alan, Mary and I lived on more of the school property, the Roane College, the Wheat High School property than anyone else. I remember one incident that I would like to relay now: a lady went out to Chet Watson’s store, I think that’s a relative of his, and said that Chet’s wife had just put her foot down and she wasn’t going to move, what they going to do? Mr. Watson said they would take her and her foot both and they’ll put her out of here. I moved from Wheat to Clinton. Have served a lifetime in education, ended up at Maryville High School and am a retired principle from Maryville High School.
Bonita Irwin: I am Bonita Irwin from Harriman. I live on Sugar Grove Valley Road. I was born in Wheat, I was born right at the east end of K-25. They have never put a marker there. I’ve asked for it, but I never have gotten it. I have a son that is a dentist and a daughter that is a dental hygienist. We was a family of six. I had a brother, Marvin, that was the Sheriff of Roane County for four terms and then he was tax assessor for 16 years. He is deceased. I had a sister, Annette, and a sister, Gertrude. She is deceased and I live on Sugar Grove Valley Road. I didn’t live in Wheat right at the time because my husband was with TVA and we was going from place to place and at the time we were living in West Tennessee. So I missed a lot of the moving and I am sure glad I did.
Patricia Clark: Barbara. Barbara is Ms. Moneymaker’s niece.
Barbara McCall-Ely: I’m Barbara. Well, I guess I should say McCall and Sellers family. I married an Ely out in Oklahoma. I was 11 when they moved us from my home place which was 200 years old. My great-grandmother’s home place. I lived with my grandparents Smith and Mertle Sellers. We moved to Cartive, which is close to Rockwood, most of you might know where it is. Went to school a little while there. I should say I went to Wheat until December of ’42. Then they had us go to Dyllis until they moved us out in ’43. I went to Cartive School about two months, which was horrible. But I finished up in Rockwood School in the eighth grade. During this time I had lost my great-grandmother that grieved herself to death because we were away from home. She died in 1945, we had moved in ’43. So, then my mother married in 1945 to a Texan and they moved us to Texas, away from our Tennessee roots, and I lived there and went to school, nursing school in Galveston, TX. Graduated from there. I worked in Texas a great deal, mostly in juvenile treatment centers, also in Oklahoma with juvenile treatment centers. I married a Baptist preacher, which I said I would never do. I said I would never marry a preacher or a doctor, but I did marry a preacher and he was an Oklahoma person, so we stayed in Oklahoma. When he passed away in ’85, I moved back home to my mountains with my aunt, whom I live with now. I was a nurse until 1996. I retired as an RN from Briarcliff Nursing Home here in Oak Ridge.
Patricia Clark: I need to tell you this next guest is a pinch hitter. Joe Magill. Alan Murray was scheduled to be on this panel and couldn’t make it and I think is wonderful that Joe was willing to come.
Joe Magill: I’m Joe Magill. I’m an attorney in Clinton, Tennessee, been there for 41 years. Wheat emphasized education quite a bit and was ahead of our time. The school there had running water, indoor plumbing, a big gymnasium and when they evicted us, I moved to Dutch Valley, which is in Anderson County, had to go to a three-room school, didn’t have indoor plumbing, no recreation facilities, no cafeteria, and Wheat had one of the best cafeterias around. Bill’s mother was a dietitian there. And of course, also the Wheat school had a 150 acre farm and they raised crops on that farm which was used in the cafeteria. Now of course, we would take maybe a peck of potatoes, there was five of us, and we would get enough tickets to buy food for a week. My father’s farm was just below where 95 and Bear Creek Valley intersects. It was the second farm. It was commonly known as Magill Valley. Our farm was first, and I have the land grants from 1832. Uncle Ben Magill was next and Naomi Brummit. Where is Naomi? Her father’s farm was next and then Bill Magill’s was the next farm. So it was known as Magill Valley. I have a lady here on my left and she’s my sister and she will tell you a little bit about her.
Eula Magill-Cooper: I’m Eula Magill Cooper and I have a twin sister and we were born the 21st of July in 1923. Our grandmother Freels died when we were five days old. Then in November, Daddy bought out the Magills-Eries and we moved to Bear Creek Valley. We all attended Wheat School until we had to leave in ’42, but I married a man from Lafayette and in ’51 we went to Minneapolis to live. And we have three children. Gary Cooper, he has his business in Clinton. Insurance. And then we have a daughter, Sharon Judge, she works at Methodist Center. She’s over the heart department or something. I don’t understand. And then we have a daughter that lives in Bartley and she has a Masters in Nursing. Then we have seven grandchildren. I live in Clinton now. My husband was in a real bad accident in ’66 that left him with permanent brain damage and so we moved back to be close to family but we did have a wonderful school. It was one of the best in the south.
Patricia Clark: Now George didn’t actually live in Wheat, but he had a lot of Wheat connections and things that he can tell us about. Just introduce yourself now George.
George Stubbs: I’m George Stubbs and I live in Oak Ridge. I have been here for 42 years now. I’m a retired machinist at Y-12. Worked there for 27 and a half years in the Fabrication Division. And my connection is I had an ancestor that left North Carolina in 1798, and settled in the Wheat community. A couple of these ladies here are a part of my descendants, I guess, I’m cousins to them. His name was Aaron Stubbs. My grandmother also was raised here in this community. Her name was McKinney. One of her ancestors gave the property for them to establish Wheat School. It was with the idea that it would be used for the education of the kids in school. And if it ever ceased to be a school it would go back to the McKinneys. Well, one of my relatives said they researched it after it had been taken over and he said, well, we get paid for this. After going through it he said he figured it would probably be a couple dollars per descendant because there were so many people to be sharing in this property if they got it back. I visited this area quite frequently. I would walk with my grandmother over to a farm down right near the sewer treatment plant. We would always go there on Decoration Day, which know you know is Memorial Day, and her mother, father, and her sister were buried there. She was a very, very stout lady. We would walk from over on Poplar Creek across here. My reason for here is I would like to make some comment about how poor and underdeveloped this area was. It is unbelievable, if you would stop to think that most these places had no running water, no lights, no sewage and the schools here didn’t have any supplies. Books and any material you would need for going to school wasn’t supplied by the state of Tennessee until about 1948, ‘49, sometime after the war was over. We are still trying to catch up on that part of the school system in the state of Tennessee.
Patricia Clark: Thank you. The other hand-out you have shows the Wheat Community Center and I checked with Dorathy this morning because it shows the George Jones Memorial Baptist Church in two places. It was north of the road and if you go out there now you can actually walk along that little old road and look up at the church. It also has Wheat school on both sides of the map. And Dorathy is going to tell us about the school and how they were named. But I wanted her first tell us how the name Wheat came about.
Dorathy Moneymaker: Well, it is not really hard, the community had been there for a long time and had been known as Bald Hill. That was because all the trees on the hills had been cut down, I guess they chopped them down back then. When we got our first post office in the Wheat community, our postmaster was Henry Franklin Wheat, which his picture is back there somewhere and they named the community Wheat after our first postmaster. I want to say a little bit about this map while I’m here. There was a building that had been used for a school and a church up on the hill not too far from where the old church that is still there. And when they put up a new church they moved the old building down the hill across the road and put it down there where they have got George Jones Memorial Baptist Church. Down here. It was Wheat post office and there was a store and they added five rooms so the family could live there. Actually, when I look at this, it sort of makes me sick to my stomach, for it is such a mess. I don’t know who fixed it, but I hope they aren’t here this morning. (Laughter) Now, what else did you want me to say?
Don Watson: That’s all.
Patricia Clark: I wanted you to talk a little bit about Wheat’s real legacies.
Dorathy Moneymaker: Let me scoot up to the table. I’m use to standing up when I talk.
Patricia Clark: Well, if you feel more comfortable Dorathy, go ahead.
Dorathy Moneymaker: No, I’ll manage. I don’t think that they want me to tell you all I know about the school.
Don Watson: I hope not. (Laughter)
Dorathy Moneymaker: If you have ever read “We’ll Call it Wheat”, which is in the city library, you will find that they had a school in the Wheat community when it was Bald Hill. They were subscription schools. Do you know what a subscription school was? The people that come pay for it. It usually lasted about three to four months. Tennessee became a state on June 1, 1796, but there was no levy on a tax to establish a public school until well into the 1800’s. They had private schools, subscription schools, they had schools at churches, there was lots of teaching went on in the homes, not just your children, but if the neighbor children wanted to come in that was alright too. The Robinson Schoolhouse is the first one I have a date on. It was in 1850, and there were other schools besides that, but I don’t have exact dates on it. This Robinson Schoolhouse, it states that it was where the Mt. Zion Baptist Church and Roane College later stood. Did you know that the Wheat community had a Roane College before we had a Roane College?
Don Watson: It was a four year accredited.
Dorathy Moneymaker: Yeah, a four year accredited college. Also our high school, when it became a high school it was one of the accredited schools. Many of the people and I will not name neighborhoods that had schools, but they were not qualified. So people would come to Wheat and go to school so that they could get into college. You know where that church is, most of you will, if you don’t you need to drive down that direction and see it. Since all the pine trees have died, it’s not hard to see. You go up that driveway to the church, now you can’t know about it unless you have been there. We have a Homecoming the first Sunday in October of every year. And you can get in there then, but you go up to the top of the hill and instead of turning to the left where the church is, you turn to the right and go out on the top of the hill, which you can’t do now because it is covered with trees, but out there is where the Roane College was, but some of the other schools was in a close connection, it was just Roane College and it was as Don said, accredited. It eventually, now, it had no state help until it become Wheat High School. Then Roane College moved into the Wheat High School building and it ceased to exist. I’m going to tell you where the high school sat. You know where Blair Road is? And the Turnpike, before you get to that Blair Road light you are going through the football field of the Wheat High School. The school sat in the corner of Blair Road at that right and the Turnpike. For a long time it sat there. Then it was torn down. I think some of the steps are still there, but anyways that’s where it was, but it grew gradually, I can remember when they add to it. We had a Delco, thing-a-ma-jig that had water in the school, before we got regular sewage and so forth. The school sat where I told you there in that corner. Just across there on the other side is where my grandmother and grandfather lived there. He was a rural delivery mailman. For years and years. I forgot how long, I think I wrote it down somewhere. You see my memory isn’t getting short, I just that I know so much it is hard to remember. (Laughter) You see he carried it on horseback. He wouldn’t get off his horse and leave the mail on it. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday he did one route, and on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday he did the other route. The women along the routes would fix him a plate of food and he would sit on the horse and eat it. Let’s see. Back to that Roane College though. It was a two story house when it was built. They had been Poplar Creek Seminary before that in 1877, and W.H. Crawford, well, he was the president and teacher of the Poplar Creek Seminary, but he was also a Common Presbyterian preacher. He went to Washington College and then there was talking about land being given. A Pyatt couple gave land in 1878, George and Lucinda McKinney-Jones donated 100 acres in 1879. All denominations were involved in all the schools and all the churches. Let me tell you how we had churches back then. We had two buildings and three denominations. Now, if you know where the turn off to Lenoir City is down there, across from there you will see a marker where the Presbyterian Church sat. My maternal grandfather gave the land for that, but it was used for dangerous materials during the war, and so it had to be torn down. On the first Sunday in every month, we met at the Baptist Church, that one that is still standing, and had Sunday school all denominations and those that didn’t even have the Lord. Didn’t have nowhere to go, no television to watch, so they all came to church. The Baptist preacher would come and preach. Then the second Sunday in the month, we would meet out at the Common Presbyterian Church, all of us had Sunday school. Then we would have the Common Presbyterian preacher to preach. He usually lived in Oliver Springs. He had a church in Oliver Springs, Coalfield, Wheat, and Lawnville. That was the other one. On the fifth Sundays, he went to Scarboro and had church. But anyway, the third Sunday in the month, the Wheat community went back to the Baptist Church and had Sunday school. Oh, and by the way, it didn’t matter whether your Sunday school teacher was of the same denomination your family was or not. We didn’t ask them, and didn’t know to ask them. We would have Sunday school. We didn’t have any preacher that Sunday. So, us young’uns enjoyed it more than anything else because we got out and played together while the parents gossiped with each other. And then on the fourth Sunday we went back to the Common Presbyterian Church and after Sunday school the Methodist minister preached. Now for my life, I can’t remember what we did on the fifth Sundays, but I am sure we had Sunday school. I can’t say what church we met in, I don’t know who even decided it, but any way we had it. Are you about ready for me to shut up?
Patricia Clark: I’m going to let Bill tell something about the housing that the college provided for people. I thought that was very interesting in your book Dorathy.
Dorathy Moneymaker: Only thing is he is so much younger than me, he can’t know much.
Bill Driscoll: I agree. Now, I was 12 years old when we left there. So, she can have permission to correct me anytime that she wants to. Now, Patricia asked me to mention that I had lived in a lot of the properties that were at the time owned by Roane county and Wheat High School, but had been built and owned by Roane College. My mother was a divorcee and at the time of her divorce she moved the five of us children back to Wheat. My father remarried and remained in the Rockwood vicinity. This was right in the middle of the Depression. It was a hard time. We moved back to an old house that was owned by William West Williams. Snyder Roberts is a friend of mine, former historian in Roane County, and I am going to give you some of his speculations later about some of the places I had lived, but after a short period in this older house, we moved down to the boys dormitory. Now, that is five people living in a 12 room house. It had not been built the ordinary way. It was built as a dormitory. And I have talked with people when it was really a dormitory. Big rooms, four rooms downstairs here, four rooms upstairs, and then four rooms going back to the back. It was a tremendously big place, but across the yard was a house that had been built by George Jones. Now, if you get one name about Wheat, George Jones is the name and he was a very wealthy man evidently, gave a lot of property, so we got the privilege to live across the street. Now, my grandmother Driscoll, Jeanie Driscoll, and all these people know Jeanie Driscoll, she was an invalid and lived close to the road. As they would pass by, a lot of people would stop and talk to her. Jeanie Driscoll had lived in the boarding house, and I’ve told you that we lived in the boarding house and later the better house over, smaller house, but better house. You know when you get old, and you’re not this old yet, when you get old you tell the same stories over and over. My aunt Jeanie Driscoll would tell this story about living in the dormitory. My father Charlie was very young. This was the coldest house I have ever lived in. I don’t think it had a bit of insulation. The water would freeze in the bucket, in the drinking bucket. My father would warm by the fire and then run up the stairs and jump in the bed, trying to still be warm when he got in there. He’d started his run one night, Jeanie Driscoll told me over and over, started his run and his mother Jeanie said, “Charlie”, and she heard this big bang and said, “I moved the bed!” (Laughter) He had gone up stairs and jumped into the wall. (Laughter) That was her favorite story. My mother worked in the school and she would be honored that Joe said she was the dietician. I like that Joe. They never heard of that term. What she really did was take food and Joe said they brought food; everybody brought food, barter system. You get tickets for how much food you brought. And that was the way; it must have been real hard record keeping. But I remember it was a real good lunch room. I enjoyed eating there and I worked in the lunch room and we also as a family served as custodians, either officially or unofficially of George Jones Memorial Church. We were connected all the way. Now Snyder Roberts, I’ve mentioned and I’m not going to take too much time here, but Snyder Roberts had a theory because of where Jeanie Driscoll and William Driscoll’s home was built and where Roane College was and their policy at Roane College would let teachers build on their property, or in his case William Driscoll at some time in his lifespan had been the overseer of that farm that Joe Magill talked about. His theory was that Jeanie Driscoll’s home had been built on the Roane College property and if you know where Roane College property was, a few hundred yards out the ridge, was the place that we are talking about. We lived on the Wheat property and one disadvantage that we had; you know most people owned property we didn’t own any property. My sister Dot, Dorothy Driscoll, had moved to Clinton and that’s how we all ended up in Clinton. My mother died in 1946, and my older sisters kept us all together and remember my brother and I were just 12 and nine years old at the time. Now, since we lived on school property, people felt free as they came back, live in Knoxville and come back and picked blackberries on the school farm.
We had an uncle who was famous in a different kind of way, I guess. Do you remember Pickle Fritz? Pickle Fritz traveled with the circus and was advertised as the biggest fat man. I remember we as children had to take our seesaw down and put a platform on it for Pickle to have a sit, so he could have a seat and not break down the chairs. The fair, since I lived on school property, when the fair came back each year, and I was there. Twelve years old and younger, and my uncle Jim decided one year he’d enter me in one of the contests. They had the prettiest girl, meanest boy, and ugliest man, penny a vote, and you know you have seen that kind of thing done. My uncle Jim said I won by a landslide, but they had a hard time convincing me that it was an honor to be chosen as the meanest boy in Wheat. But I hold that distinction, that’s one thing, and Chester Watson was chosen as the ugliest man.
You know the fair holds fond memories, and probably all these people came to the fair and you know it was a big fair, they had a fair barn, the school was open, it was a big time. Now, Charlie Mary was one of my real friends as a youngster. The Mary family and Alan’s not here or he would be a big part of this. The Mary family stayed on in Oak Ridge. Charlie Mary had been a part of George Jones Memorial and stayed on in Oak Ridge. He became a guard, in fact captain of the guard force down there. Alan, and his father, and Bonita here, and a lot of these people up here have kept the Wheat Reunion going and the pictures that you can see back in the back.
One more thing and I’ll close; it asks a questions and Patricia when she sent this out, “What was your reaction to the announcement of the Atomic Bomb?” Now, I have a peculiar situation there. I had gone to Oak Ridge to work in the cafeteria, and I maybe wasn’t quite old enough, but I got a job there anyway, Wheat Colony Cafeteria. If you go down in the Wheat community you would have a hard time believing that there were trailers, there were huts, and all down there enough to have a cafeteria and the people of course worked over in the plants. The Wheat Colony Cafeteria was where I was working and I was staying with my Uncle Charlie. The paper came out, The Knoxville papers came out with the whole spiel about the atomic bomb and I couldn’t comprehend that. I mean, it was too much. We sat on the home, it was Don Watson’s family home and we could see the glass building and mile long building, saying that’s where the atomic bomb [came from]. And we were relieved to learn that all of it hadn’t been made there, and there wouldn’t be any explosion there, but it was a real sobering kind of thing to sit there, and look where what we thought the atomic bomb was build there. It ended up it wasn’t all built there, but the glass building, the mile long building would mean a lot to some of you, I think.
Patricia Clark: Well, thank you, Bill. I won’t have to ask you my question later about the bomb. That was going to come later.
Bill Driscoll: OK.
Patricia Clark: Don, Oak Ridge has quite a sports reputation and I understand that Wheat did also. Could you tell us a little bit about sports in Wheat?
Don Watson: I would like to clarify one thing first that I can’t tell a lie. I’m not 80. I’m nearly 83. So, she isn’t much ahead of me. (Laughter) I want to tell one thing about her, she is feisty. She was feisty when she was young. I remember my father was very stern and she came to spend the night with my sister. It was summer and we had one of those wind up Victrolas in the parlor we called it. We had a nine room house, ‘cause there are nine boys and one girl in my family, and I was the youngest, but she was visiting my sister and she was out on the front porch doing the Charleston. My father came up, he looked very sternly and said, “Young Lady, you are welcome to visit our home any time you wish, but there will be no dancing.” So, she quite dancing. But she’s still feisty. (Laughter) But, getting back to the athletics of the schools. I don’t remember back the earliest part because when I was in school I started in 1924 in school. We had outdoor basketball; we had no electricity at all. About three or four years later we had had an outside gymnasium built, I say an outside one, it was a structure we used also for the fairs. Then the lightning hit that and burned it down. The county built an addition to our school and we had Delco lights, and the opposing teams would say that every time they had the ball when we played a basketball game, we’d cut the power down and they couldn’t see the goals. But that wasn’t the truth, we were just better than they were. We had some good football teams back in the earlier days. We had a coach that come there from Florida and he brought about five or six husky guys with him. I don’t know where they came from, they must have been ringers. But they had a championship team that year in football. We didn’t have enough boys in our school, as a rule to play football. But Bonita’s brother, Marvin Stonecipher, who later was the captain of the police force here in Oak Ridge during the war. But he was a good player. At one of the football games at Copper Hill, at night, now he was ahead of me, about four years older than me, I wasn’t playing at the time, he kicked the football from the back of the end zone and the lights were not too good, it was the first year they had lights. That safety man was back looking for the ball and finally he saw it and it bounced all the way across the goal line, 125 yards. I have a record of it that if they had put it in the books it would have been the record of world’s longest kick.
Dorathy Moneymaker: What about that time that he kicked one in Tennessee and ended up all the way in Alabama? (Laughter)
Don Watson: Now, I don’t lie like that. (Laughter) I don’t tell lies like that. But anyway, a few times we didn’t have enough to play football. My dad said I had enough work to do at home that I didn’t need to exercise playing sports. But most the time we played it in the afternoon and I didn’t tell him I played until one time I came home with a big puffed eye. He looked at it and said, “What happened?” I said, “I ran into a fellow”. The next day I picked up potatoes all day long and I’d drop down and that eye would flip back and forth, and then Sunday morning I went to church and then back to school on Monday. I developed a headache. The coach took me home. My dad took me to the doctor, and said I had a concussion, leave him in bed for a couple, three days. Next morning I was in convulsions, they rushed me back to the hospital and I had a compound skull fracture and a blood clot and had to be operated on. My dad never forgave me for playing football, but two years later I went back and played again. As far as sports are concerned. Most the time, after we got our gymnasium we had pretty a fair basketball, boys and girls. In 1936, the year I graduated there were seven of us seniors on the team and one junior, had 22 games we won and lost one, then we went to the district tournament, and we lost in the finals to a team of Harriman that we had beaten twice during the season. I have a picture back there that was taken 55 years later. All of us were there. The full team plus the whole class. There were nine boys and nine girls in our graduating class. Since then there are only three boys left and I happen to be one of the lucky ones.
I’m going to tell just a little bit about the school. My mother was a teacher. She had migrated from Knoxville County and was a teacher in Roane College in 1894, and married my father who had lived there for about four or five generations. And his name was George Jones Watson. His great-uncle was George Jones by marriage because George Jones’ wife was related to my family. I found out over there that he must be kin to me too ‘cause my grandmother was a McKinney, Arta Lisa McKinney. So, my connections, most everybody intermingled and became related someway in that community because they had nowhere else to go. (Laughter) Anyways we had some good football teams. After that, I left in ‘36, I lost track of a lot. They had six-man football. If you’ll look in the Wheat museum there is a picture of a six-man football team. I wasn’t on it because I was gone. I was in the service from ‘42 to ‘46.
Speaking of the atomic bomb, I am very proud of that because I was in Europe and been there two years and were just on the verge of being shipped to Japan. And the news of the atomic bomb stopped us from going to there. I might not be here today to blabber to you on all these things I’m saying. But anyway, I am proud that we had the atomic bomb. I think that we still need to be prepared, whether or not we use it. I don’t think we should ever use it unless necessary, but I hope we’ll always have it in case we do have it, because many lives were saved because of the atomic bomb, of not only the American soldiers, but of the Japanese soldiers and their civilians.
Patricia Clark: Thank you Don. Because I want to get one more person in before the break. You’re bringing in the war, I would like for Bonita to show and tell what she brought this morning. Bill maybe you could help her.
Bill Driscoll: I can try. You want me to help you? Maybe Don can hold one side.
Bonita Irwin: Sometimes we wonder why we-
Patricia Clark: Excuse me, if you could get the microphone.
Bonita Irwin: Sometimes we wonder why we had to leave our homes in Wheat, the community that we loved dearly, and the friends that we parted with they’re scattered everywhere. We don’t know where some of them is even. We try to contact them at Homecoming time, but it’s just impossible to reach them all. This is boys that was called into the service. There are 157 names on there, and I’m sure that we probably missed some, hoped we didn’t, but there is a name on each star, and I guess we was real lucky to not lose any more boys than we did. We lost nine of our precious boys in the war. The lady that started this flag, had the forethought about her to do this, and we are so proud that she did. The flag that she done, wore out and about two years ago I redone the flag, but we are proud of our boys and many of them gone on to be, to be with the Lord now, but we are really proud of them. That is really why we are here today. That’s why we lost our community.
Patricia Clark: I would like to thank the panelists so far. We’ll have about a five to seven minute break, and that will give you time to look at some of the pictures in the back. We will be back at 11 o’clock.
[Break in video]
Patricia Clark: We are going to have to hear from the other side of the panel in the next portion of this program. And before we do, I would like to read something to you on making the site selection of Oak Ridge. I don’t know whether all our Wheat friends know this story, but this is another story I borrowed from Dorathy’s book, “Let’s Call it Wheat.” Her brother-in-law Berlin C. Moneymaker was the chief of the geological branch of TVA and he “had been instructed to find a site meeting these conditions: a large area accessible by rail; thinly populated; a relatively short distance of a sizeable city, but not too close; easily controlled; a natural boundary, a river or ridge desirable.” He further went on to say that two areas came to mind: the Roane County Site, which included Wheat, Bethel Valley, and Bear Creek Valley, and another site in Rhea County. Stone and Webster Engineers and the Army representatives who toured these sites with Mr. Moneymaker, then made the final selection of the Roane-Anderson Site. So, that was a Moneymaker who put Oak Ridge on the map. Now, I’m going to look to my left, and I think I’ll start at the other end. George just ask you to tell us what you told me about one of the crops grown in Wheat that you helped bring in.
George Stubbs: Pat is talking about the peaches orchards that were in this area. Black Oak Ridge when I was a kid had three peach orchards. They had one, Williams Orchard, and then there was Fib-Hester Orchard. And then the large orchard was Dyllis Orchard. This Dyllis Orchard was a sizable place. A lot of peaches picked there. This harvest was done in the early part of the month of August. In 1936 or ‘37, I got a job as a water boy for a row boss. His name was Paris Hatmaker, and there be about 15 or 20 people in a row crew and they would pick these peaches into these, well, they were bags, a regular bag, it would hold a bushel of peaches. These peaches would be hauled out from the top of K-25 hill, where K-25 is. I’m sure you saw remnants of an orchard there when the plant was being built. They were hauled to Dyllis. Dyllis was the train stop for the L and N, to be the closest place to Wheat. Now, they would haul those peaches there by wagon or any kind of a conveyance they could get. They graded these peaches. This harvest lasted about two weeks. They would grade those peaches night and day and pack them in baskets and load them on refrigerated cars. The L and N would stop there and set off cars, they were refrigerated. They were shipped north, well, I understood, to Detroit and the northern markets there. During the Depression, it was so expensive to ship fruit and people had little money to buy, that they could not keep the orchard going. So, they couldn’t pay the freight on these peaches. So as a result of the Depression, the orchard, I think, went out of business, for all practical purposes, and but they would ship car loads of peaches out of here.
The other thing that I wanted to talk about with this Wheat business. While we were talking about the school. I went to a school outside Wheat, but Don’s sister, Lucille Watson, who I’m happy to say is still living, was a school teacher of mine; Johnny Arle, who passed away Saturday, he was also a teacher, and his wife; Katherine Gallaher, Frankie Pickle, all the teachers that were supplied in the surrounding schools got their education from Wheat School. It evidently was a very good school. It supplied this area with teachers, but my school business, that I was speaking about a minute ago: I went to Oliver Springs, and another little school called Orchard View. Well, the money that I made as being a water boy in the peach orchard I used to buy my books. There was another fellow; he was a black kid, about my age by the name of Moore. He and I carried a three gallon keg of water up to the row boss to where they were working, and carried water. Well, the weather was kind of like it is now. It was very hot. These guys would wash their mouths out, wash out the chewing tobacco, washed their mouth out with water, and they’d get rid of a keg of water, you know, very quickly. We had to go down the hill to a spring, that was the only water sources that were available, and then carry this keg back up to the top of the hill or somewhere along the area, wherever they were working, but it was quite an experience. I’ll give you some idea. The first year I went to high school, I saved money; I picked berries and did some other things. I had eight dollars and something to buy books. That will give you some idea about what the economy was around here. There was little or no money. Don was saying that some people had a water bucket with a dipper; some had a water bucket with a gourd that they used to drink out of. It would generally sit on the back porch. If you were lucky it was a cedar bucket, kept the water quite cool, even on a warm day.
I have been suggested to give something on the recreation around here. There was two places here just inside Oak Ridge. One of them was up on Hilltop. My mom use to call it a roadhouse. And so, the men would gather there mostly on the weekend. They had various types of activities that were entertaining, plus drinking beer and doing cards I guess, and gambling. But I found out here, maybe about 10 years ago, that on the greenbelt back of my house, between Iroquois and Johnson Road, there is a stretch of greenbelt there, that there is a pit there and I met this gentleman from Middle Tennessee, he was head of the TVA group here, and he came up there for some recreation and said, “I want to know where that cockfight pit was.” They had got there in the afternoon, whenever it got a little bit dark they would walk down through the greenbelt. And so it’s still there, there is a pit, just back of my house on greenbelt where they conducted cockfights there. That was one of their recreations. Cockfighting and coon hunting, we had a lot of coon hunters around here, and this always worked out to be on Friday and Saturday night.
Patricia Clark: Eula, you were quite young, would you mind telling us a little about your life in Wheat.
Eula Magill-Cooper: Well, there were five of us children, and I remember the day that Joe was born; Uncle Bill Magill lived with us. And I don’t remember going to my Aunt Dora and Uncle Ben Magill’s, but he came and got us. Told us we had a little baby brother and she and I ran all the way home saying, “He’s going to be mine, he’s going to be mine!” I thought we were poor, but really we were rich, because we had parents that loved us and taught us the way of God. And Joe and Kenneth made a little wagon and they wouldn’t let us girls play with it, so Beulah, Marie and I made us a wagon and you can imagine what that was like. We would build playhouses and go to the woods and get moss for our carpet. We were just blessed in so many, many ways. We played Hoopie-Hide, and Annie-Over, and Hopscotch. We had friends that came home with us from school and would spend the night. I am just thankful that God gave me a good mother and dad.
Patricia Clark: Thank you Eula.
Eula Magill-Cooper: I have just so many memories it would be impossible to tell them all.
Patricia Clark: Well Joe, I’m going to skip you right for the moment and let Barbara tell us about her memories.
Barbara McCall-Ely: As I said, I am Barbara McCall-Ely, but I was kin to everybody in Wheat Community. (Laughter) My Grandmother use to say, “Don’t you say anything bad about anybody ‘cause they’re kin to you.” So, I was kin to the Smiths, the McKinney’s the Sellers, and my aunt married into the Moneymakers. I was kin to everybody. I was even kin to old Don Watson. But I want to tell you something about the closeness of our community. When I was a little kid and Don Watson and all those big fellows were around, you know, little bitty kid, I was the pretty girl that Bill Driscoll was the meanest boy, (Laughter) I was the pretty girl, so anyway and Chet Watson was the ugliest man, but anyway. We all were sort of like a family because there was family connections. Now as Dot said the Moneymakers were only there 10 years. My McCall family was there approximately 10 years. My granddaddy had a peach orchard, but they didn’t live there very long. They were North Carolinians. So, you know. But anyway, I was born into Smith-Sellers family. My mother was Winnie May Sellers, she married Guy McCall, later married Shields Brown in Texas as I told you, but the closeness of our community, my brother and I were raised by grandparents who were 42 and 50-ish. And these, the Cooper boys, the Watson boys, anybody, the Arnold boys and girls, everybody looked after Gene and Barbara McCall. I have an older brother that’s almost two years older than I, but we would go wherever the teenagers went. If they were going if we got a chance to go, we went too. So, we were always the ones that were sticking around various places. So I knew everybody. My granddaddy was superintendent of the Sunday school in the Common Presbyterian, and I don’t know, I guess the Baptist church. I didn’t know if I was Baptist, Common Presbyterian, or Methodist. And I’m still perfectly happy at any service; however, all the preachers preach the same, hell fire and brimstone. And it would scare me, and I’d scrunch up against my granddaddy and say, “Oh Granddaddy, I don’t wanna burn.” You know they said it scared the little children, but I was saved quite young, so I guess it was good. But any way and I am a Baptist.
My grandmother was a Republican, and my granddaddy was a Democrat. One of my grandmother’s folks fought for the North; my granddaddy’s folks fought for the South. So politics or the war or religion, or your politics things were never discussed. Except my granddaddy would say, “I killed your vote Mertle.” So, you know I was raised in a very loving, a very caring family. I was blessed that my great-grandmother Sellers lived with us for seven years of my life. My great-grandfather Stubbs would come and visit from Rockwood quite often after he lost his wife. And he was there lots and he was blind for most of my life. I think I was real small when he went blind. But he had a way of getting around very agilely. Grandpa was not a type that felt sorry for himself. He took his little cane and we could hear him hitting things, but he got around well. He was not messy at eating. And we had a blessing of a long standing, God-fearing generation. My great-great-great- Dorathy, great. I think it was five greats, his name was Micah Sellers, he is in the Tennessee Baptist minister’s book. He started Overton. He preached at George Jones. He was a part all of the community as a whole. My granddaddy, his father, as Dot said, was the mail man. And I’ve been told the reason I like horses so well, my Grandpa Sellers, who I thought was a giant. He was a little bit taller than my granddaddy. So, my Great-Grandpa Sellers would put me up on his horsy with his mail bags and I thoroughly enjoyed that. So they were called Uncle Mike and Aunt Molly. The community and even Bethel Valley knew Uncle Mike and Aunt Molly Sellers. Everybody knew the two of them. My grandmother was a Smith. And then you know, as I said, course we went very seldom to Harriman, but now you remember where there was an old beer joint on Riley and something road, down here and it burned. That was our old Locket’s Store, and Doctor Linus Locket’s dad built that store. And that’s where we came from Wheat to go get the bus to Knoxville. We had to travel there and then we could get a bus at Locket’s Store. Believe me, Mr. Locket did not like anything to do with liquor. So it upset me some when I saw all those liquor signs. Of course I was very angry and my brother was even angrier than I. We were teenagers or close to it and Gene was so angry that he doesn’t even like to come back here anymore because of what the government did. He ended up going in the Navy in 1949 stayed with the Navy for 28 years, and then was a postman like his great-grandfather and grandfather until he retired from the post office out in Oakland, California. And I became a nurse, first of all. I started school in Wheat, left in the fifth grade. Went to Dyllis, went to Cartive, went to Rockwood then sailed to Texas. Got my high school education in Petersburg, Texas, close to Lubbock, Texas. Went to Galveston, Texas for my nursing, started as an aid at the St. Mary’s Hospital in Galveston, Texas, ended up as an LPN three years later, and six years later, I was an RN. I worked, as I said, with juvenile treatment centers most of the time. I did some pediatric nursing and I finished out when I could no longer help control the juvenile treatment children in Texas and Oklahoma because you did have to work very hard with them at times. I ended up at the Briarcliff Nursing Home here in Oak Ridge in 1996. Several years of nursing. I also married one of the best men in the world, I couldn’t have a Tennessean. I guess I should say Alan Murray and I were sort of sweet hearts as little kids, ‘cause we were in the same class, but Alan’s folks didn’t come until we were in the third grade, so we didn’t have too much time ‘cause I left in the fifth grade. Our closeness affairs, our closeness of loving our school and what it meant to us, our families talked about God, education and being something, making something out of yourself. You didn’t live off of welfare. It was a disgrace to go to the poor farm. We didn’t expect to live off of others, but as I said, as the government came and I do not, I must say this, I do not like the bell that you all have in Oak Ridge. I am very unhappy with that bell. When it gongs, I shiver, because we didn’t jump on Japan, they jumped on us. So I don’t like that bell. It shouldn’t be there. Take it up to Washington and let them have it ‘cause they were the ones that took our place. But anyway, that is one of my little things that I have to say to God each day,”Oh Lord let me hear that bell.” And he’s getting better, I’m getting deaf. So I can’t hear it so well, when they gong it. But I certainly haven’t looked at it any more than I had to. I am glad the trees grow up around it some, but anyway I do want to say that I feel like we were not paid well for our farms. Some of our cemeteries are a disgrace. The ones that the government has, now I can say that, they take better care of them then the City of Oak Ridge. Scott-Cabbage cemetery is pitiful looking. The Gallaher cemetery, Welkler-Gallaher, oh they made a big thing out of the slaves. There any colored folks here? Glad you all got a beautiful cemetery ‘cause my Welkler- Gallaher looks pitiful. I do think we were shoved out, put upon and you know it said on the thing, Johnny Qualls is not around, but it said on the deed of his daddy, “When the government is through with your property you can buy it back for the same price”. Johnny’s tried. He didn’t make it. Now I understand one of the Gallaher’s got part of their property back but I understand that’s right, but they paid us very poorly. I don’t even remember, it was way in ‘44 or ‘45 before my granddaddy was paid for his property, or his mother’s property. We were broken up as a family. As Don said, he went off to war and when he came back he couldn’t find his Wheat family. Because we moved from Washington state, Washington DC, some are overseas, but you know, I feel like that there are many, many, many, many, many intelligent people that came from Wheat Community and if you’ll look around and if you think about it, several have still come back home. We even still have some more people coming back home. Bill Driscoll’s cousin, Betty Jane Elsey, is back and living in Kingston. But several of us come back to our mountains, and we are here and we do have a good Homecoming. It’s the first Sunday of October, and this year will be when I graduated 50 years ago from high school. Not here, but I’m going to have a big blast at George Jones Baptist Church. People have trouble knowing where George Jones Baptist Church is, if you go far enough down 95, you’ll find it. It’s up on the right hand side, you can’t miss it. It has a cemetery. That is the only other building left in our community since Locket’s Store was burned down. Our church, our Common Presbyterian church wasn’t torn down it was burned down, but we do have the monument.
[Break in video]
Barbara McCall-Ely: I just want to say that my Wheat Folks, and John Ernest Arnold, is one of the older ones. Bud Adams is older than John Ernest who’s still living, but we don’t have too many of our old group, it’s left up much like Dorathy, Don, Bonita, and then there is the bunch that were in the fifth grade and below that there aren’t too many people that come to Homecoming. I wish we could get more of them. But anyway, our closeness was we had dinners. Dot said she didn’t know what we did on the fifth Sunday; well, the fifth Sunday was a big dinner, on the ground at George Jones Baptist Church. I can remember during revivals and they had them three weeks and I would be put on a pallet in the back of George Jones Baptist Church and I would go to sleep because I was little and most anybody they watched all of us. But we had a downstairs at that time, course do to the vandals thinking it was a ghost church, they vandalize our church all the time. We can’t even put windows in there because they break them out. We can’t put lights in there because they break them out. Apparently they think this is a terrible place. But anyways, we do cherish what we have left. When I left home, I have never been back; I have never seen my home place. Men in the government say, “We’ll take you”. Well, I’ll wait and see when they do, but when God takes me to Heaven, He’ll let me pass by the Sellers home place, but anyway I have had many good times, I did not know of being jealous of anyone. They tell me know that I am grown that Smith Sellers family was rich. I did not know that. I knew my grandmother and granddaddy shared with others, but I didn’t know we were rich. Jack Rather would come and gather wheat. He had a combine. Everybody would come for hog killings and the hogs were shared. I can remember my granddaddy; because it was Depression he would give Dr. Hecker from Oliver Springs a ham or bacon for treating us children because he didn’t have the money to pay for it. But Dr. Hecker couldn’t by ham and bacon because he lived in Oliver Springs. So there were so many things, there was a closeness about us. If somebody died everybody was there for you; if someone was sick everybody took care of the crops; if somebody was just having trouble with families, as I said, I was from a divorced family and that was bad in 1930’s, but the Watsons, the Arnolds, the Stoneciphers, the McKinney’s; many, many people looked after us. I want to tell you one funny thing. Ms. Effie Driscoll, I can’t leave without telling you about her, she was a first grade teacher. Well, Mr. Don Watson and my Lee Alan Arnold, who’s gone now, were going into her grade, and you know, they always say that children cry when they first go to school. Well, Ms. Effie started crying, saying, “Here come’s Don and Lee Alan. I’m never going to live through this year.”
Patricia Clark: Thank you, Barbara. We have reached the end of our time. I do want to mention the Crossroad’s Tavern that Barbara mentioned as being the bus stop is actually in Grove Center. So they had to come from Wheat to Robertsville to get to Knoxville.
Joe Magill: Let me tell you about how Oak Ridge came to be. Senator McClellan was head of the Ways and Means Committee, and President Roosevelt came to him and said, “I need some money, a large amount of money to build a secret project.” He said, “Mr. President, where in Tennessee do you want to build it?” (Laughter)
Patricia Clark: That is a good note to close on, Joe. I did want to announce, well, next week we have the Anderson County communities, Robertsville and Scarboro people will be here with us. These sessions are being taped, videotaped, and we will have them available in the ORICL Office if you want to check any out that you missed. I also would like to put in a plug for the museum. This is a marvelous resource, and the fact that they let us use their facilities. I am a volunteer here on Wednesday afternoons and it’s a wonderful place to come and work. We have people from all over the world who come and see this museum and actually plan to come here as an end destination. So if you have any time or would like to visit with people, and the museum staff is wonderful, so I would like to put in a plug for their volunteer contingence because they do need more volunteers. Thank you for coming and we will see you next week. (Applause)
[Break in video]
Bonita Irwin: I have a grade card from the old Roane College. E.W. McKinney, some of you may know him; it’s his grade card. There have been different ones to ask me what subjects they taught and so on. And I’ll just run through some of them: English, Math, History, Latin, Physical Geography, Agriculture, Physics, Trigonometry, Spanish, Chemistry, Zoology, English Literature, American Literature, Higher Algebra, Botany, Political Economics, Sociology, and General History, and one of his grades is, he got a double A in chemistry, a B is the lowest that he got. And Political Economics he got a double A, and the rest of them is A’s. So this is the application for the Tennessee professionals. It’s a professional certificate.
Patricia Clark: I just want to say if Dorathy is the historian of Wheat then the collector and curator of the memorabilia is Bonita. (Laughter, Applause)
[End of Video]

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

ORICL Panel, Part 2: Wheat Community
“The Way We Were: Pre-Oak Ridge and Early Oak Ridge”
Interviewed by Patricia Clark
Transcribed by Jordan H. Reed
July 10, 2000
[Note: This was a video tape received from the American Museum of Science and Energy.]
Patricia Clark: When a new place is to be built, the first thing that must be done is to be rid of the old place, even though all buildings are removed the impression already made on the people who lived in the old place cannot be erased. These people go to live at another place, but they are still what they were. They become a part of their new community and add to that community those characteristics “left over” from the place that is gone. Good morning! This is the second in our series on “The Way We Were: Pre-Oak Ridge and early Oak Ridge”. I am Pat Clark, the coordinator of the program for ORICL. What I just read to you is from the forward to a book, “We’ll Call it Wheat”, by Dorathy Moneymaker, and Dorathy is one of our guests this morning. When the Army came in 1942, with the Manhattan Project, one thousand families on 56,000 plus acres had to be moved. Just one half of those acres were in Roane County, the area where K-25 and X-10 are now. Of the people who were ordered to leave on very short notice, Congressman Jennings tried to render some help, and in a telegram to President Roosevelt, and you have a copy of that in the hand-out this morning, that was a telegram that is in the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authorities] archives, pleaded that “their plight is desperate”. Payment and aid were urgently needed for relocation. Today, we are going to hear from some of those people, those families who had to leave from the Wheat Community in Roane County in early 1943. Next week our session will be on the Anderson County Communities vacated by the project. Who were these people from Wheat? They were Gallahers, Sellers, Moneymakers, Magills, Watsons, Driscolls, McKinneys, Stoneciphers, to name just a few, and we have representatives from those families with us today. Now I am going to ask our panelists to briefly identify themselves, so that you will know who they are and I am going to start with Don, who is at the far right. Don-
Don Watson: My name is Don Watson. I grew up in the Wheat Community and my family had been there since 1830. Five generations of our family had lived in the same home, which was taken over by Oak Ridge. And I left before that happened. I left in 1942 as I was in the service and I missed what went on and my father had died in ’39 and my mother had to move to Harriman. When I came back, the people were dispersed in various areas, and it was quite a chore to catch up with where they were. And of course when I came back from the service in ’46, I lived in Harriman a while and moved to Knoxville, and now I live in Maryville, where I operated a business for the past 38 years until I retired as a young man at about 80 years old. (Laughter)
Dorathy Moneymaker: If he thinks 80 is young, he ought to be 85 like I am. (Laughter) I want to tell you, my people had lived in the Wheat section for four generations. I don’t mean Moneymakers, they were new people. They just lived there 10 years, but I want to tell you a funny thing. It wasn’t funny when I happened, but it was funny. We didn’t get out in time and we were suppose to be out by the last day of ’42. They came to evict us, and the man come up to the door and he wanted to know where my husband was, and I said he was at work. He was already working up here in Oak Ridge, and he said, “Well, I come to evict, serve eviction papers on you, so I’ll just serve them on you”. Now, I was expecting our first baby, and he was born on the fourteenth day of January in 1943, and he weighed well over eight pounds. So, you know very good and well I was showing. I stepped back and I said to him, “Did you know that there is a law in the state of Tennessee that will not allow you to evict a pregnant woman?” And he was so amazed, he almost stepped off the front porch. He never did come back. I didn’t know that there was a law and I just made it up, but come to find out there was one. But we didn’t get out until April of ’43, and as I told you that child was born on the fourteenth of January. You know where Blair Road is? Ok. We went down to Blair Road to where the gate was and I was in labor. We started to Harriman Hospital and the man at the gate wanted to see my card. I didn’t have one and so they wouldn’t let me through and me in labor now mind you. And so, they let my husband through because he had one. (Laughter) He went to Oliver Springs and got a doctor and brought him down there and let me go with him, let me go with the doctor, but the doctor was so uneasy that he brought his nurse with him when he come. But we got to the Harriman Hospital. I could tell you some worse things than that, but I better hush. (Laughter)
Bill Driscoll: I’m Bill Driscoll. Family of course of the Driscoll and of the Hembry’s and a lot of these people know them. I was 12 years old and what I want to talk about later, and Patricia said we’ll get a chance to talk some later, is I think Alan, Mary and I lived on more of the school property, the Roane College, the Wheat High School property than anyone else. I remember one incident that I would like to relay now: a lady went out to Chet Watson’s store, I think that’s a relative of his, and said that Chet’s wife had just put her foot down and she wasn’t going to move, what they going to do? Mr. Watson said they would take her and her foot both and they’ll put her out of here. I moved from Wheat to Clinton. Have served a lifetime in education, ended up at Maryville High School and am a retired principle from Maryville High School.
Bonita Irwin: I am Bonita Irwin from Harriman. I live on Sugar Grove Valley Road. I was born in Wheat, I was born right at the east end of K-25. They have never put a marker there. I’ve asked for it, but I never have gotten it. I have a son that is a dentist and a daughter that is a dental hygienist. We was a family of six. I had a brother, Marvin, that was the Sheriff of Roane County for four terms and then he was tax assessor for 16 years. He is deceased. I had a sister, Annette, and a sister, Gertrude. She is deceased and I live on Sugar Grove Valley Road. I didn’t live in Wheat right at the time because my husband was with TVA and we was going from place to place and at the time we were living in West Tennessee. So I missed a lot of the moving and I am sure glad I did.
Patricia Clark: Barbara. Barbara is Ms. Moneymaker’s niece.
Barbara McCall-Ely: I’m Barbara. Well, I guess I should say McCall and Sellers family. I married an Ely out in Oklahoma. I was 11 when they moved us from my home place which was 200 years old. My great-grandmother’s home place. I lived with my grandparents Smith and Mertle Sellers. We moved to Cartive, which is close to Rockwood, most of you might know where it is. Went to school a little while there. I should say I went to Wheat until December of ’42. Then they had us go to Dyllis until they moved us out in ’43. I went to Cartive School about two months, which was horrible. But I finished up in Rockwood School in the eighth grade. During this time I had lost my great-grandmother that grieved herself to death because we were away from home. She died in 1945, we had moved in ’43. So, then my mother married in 1945 to a Texan and they moved us to Texas, away from our Tennessee roots, and I lived there and went to school, nursing school in Galveston, TX. Graduated from there. I worked in Texas a great deal, mostly in juvenile treatment centers, also in Oklahoma with juvenile treatment centers. I married a Baptist preacher, which I said I would never do. I said I would never marry a preacher or a doctor, but I did marry a preacher and he was an Oklahoma person, so we stayed in Oklahoma. When he passed away in ’85, I moved back home to my mountains with my aunt, whom I live with now. I was a nurse until 1996. I retired as an RN from Briarcliff Nursing Home here in Oak Ridge.
Patricia Clark: I need to tell you this next guest is a pinch hitter. Joe Magill. Alan Murray was scheduled to be on this panel and couldn’t make it and I think is wonderful that Joe was willing to come.
Joe Magill: I’m Joe Magill. I’m an attorney in Clinton, Tennessee, been there for 41 years. Wheat emphasized education quite a bit and was ahead of our time. The school there had running water, indoor plumbing, a big gymnasium and when they evicted us, I moved to Dutch Valley, which is in Anderson County, had to go to a three-room school, didn’t have indoor plumbing, no recreation facilities, no cafeteria, and Wheat had one of the best cafeterias around. Bill’s mother was a dietitian there. And of course, also the Wheat school had a 150 acre farm and they raised crops on that farm which was used in the cafeteria. Now of course, we would take maybe a peck of potatoes, there was five of us, and we would get enough tickets to buy food for a week. My father’s farm was just below where 95 and Bear Creek Valley intersects. It was the second farm. It was commonly known as Magill Valley. Our farm was first, and I have the land grants from 1832. Uncle Ben Magill was next and Naomi Brummit. Where is Naomi? Her father’s farm was next and then Bill Magill’s was the next farm. So it was known as Magill Valley. I have a lady here on my left and she’s my sister and she will tell you a little bit about her.
Eula Magill-Cooper: I’m Eula Magill Cooper and I have a twin sister and we were born the 21st of July in 1923. Our grandmother Freels died when we were five days old. Then in November, Daddy bought out the Magills-Eries and we moved to Bear Creek Valley. We all attended Wheat School until we had to leave in ’42, but I married a man from Lafayette and in ’51 we went to Minneapolis to live. And we have three children. Gary Cooper, he has his business in Clinton. Insurance. And then we have a daughter, Sharon Judge, she works at Methodist Center. She’s over the heart department or something. I don’t understand. And then we have a daughter that lives in Bartley and she has a Masters in Nursing. Then we have seven grandchildren. I live in Clinton now. My husband was in a real bad accident in ’66 that left him with permanent brain damage and so we moved back to be close to family but we did have a wonderful school. It was one of the best in the south.
Patricia Clark: Now George didn’t actually live in Wheat, but he had a lot of Wheat connections and things that he can tell us about. Just introduce yourself now George.
George Stubbs: I’m George Stubbs and I live in Oak Ridge. I have been here for 42 years now. I’m a retired machinist at Y-12. Worked there for 27 and a half years in the Fabrication Division. And my connection is I had an ancestor that left North Carolina in 1798, and settled in the Wheat community. A couple of these ladies here are a part of my descendants, I guess, I’m cousins to them. His name was Aaron Stubbs. My grandmother also was raised here in this community. Her name was McKinney. One of her ancestors gave the property for them to establish Wheat School. It was with the idea that it would be used for the education of the kids in school. And if it ever ceased to be a school it would go back to the McKinneys. Well, one of my relatives said they researched it after it had been taken over and he said, well, we get paid for this. After going through it he said he figured it would probably be a couple dollars per descendant because there were so many people to be sharing in this property if they got it back. I visited this area quite frequently. I would walk with my grandmother over to a farm down right near the sewer treatment plant. We would always go there on Decoration Day, which know you know is Memorial Day, and her mother, father, and her sister were buried there. She was a very, very stout lady. We would walk from over on Poplar Creek across here. My reason for here is I would like to make some comment about how poor and underdeveloped this area was. It is unbelievable, if you would stop to think that most these places had no running water, no lights, no sewage and the schools here didn’t have any supplies. Books and any material you would need for going to school wasn’t supplied by the state of Tennessee until about 1948, ‘49, sometime after the war was over. We are still trying to catch up on that part of the school system in the state of Tennessee.
Patricia Clark: Thank you. The other hand-out you have shows the Wheat Community Center and I checked with Dorathy this morning because it shows the George Jones Memorial Baptist Church in two places. It was north of the road and if you go out there now you can actually walk along that little old road and look up at the church. It also has Wheat school on both sides of the map. And Dorathy is going to tell us about the school and how they were named. But I wanted her first tell us how the name Wheat came about.
Dorathy Moneymaker: Well, it is not really hard, the community had been there for a long time and had been known as Bald Hill. That was because all the trees on the hills had been cut down, I guess they chopped them down back then. When we got our first post office in the Wheat community, our postmaster was Henry Franklin Wheat, which his picture is back there somewhere and they named the community Wheat after our first postmaster. I want to say a little bit about this map while I’m here. There was a building that had been used for a school and a church up on the hill not too far from where the old church that is still there. And when they put up a new church they moved the old building down the hill across the road and put it down there where they have got George Jones Memorial Baptist Church. Down here. It was Wheat post office and there was a store and they added five rooms so the family could live there. Actually, when I look at this, it sort of makes me sick to my stomach, for it is such a mess. I don’t know who fixed it, but I hope they aren’t here this morning. (Laughter) Now, what else did you want me to say?
Don Watson: That’s all.
Patricia Clark: I wanted you to talk a little bit about Wheat’s real legacies.
Dorathy Moneymaker: Let me scoot up to the table. I’m use to standing up when I talk.
Patricia Clark: Well, if you feel more comfortable Dorathy, go ahead.
Dorathy Moneymaker: No, I’ll manage. I don’t think that they want me to tell you all I know about the school.
Don Watson: I hope not. (Laughter)
Dorathy Moneymaker: If you have ever read “We’ll Call it Wheat”, which is in the city library, you will find that they had a school in the Wheat community when it was Bald Hill. They were subscription schools. Do you know what a subscription school was? The people that come pay for it. It usually lasted about three to four months. Tennessee became a state on June 1, 1796, but there was no levy on a tax to establish a public school until well into the 1800’s. They had private schools, subscription schools, they had schools at churches, there was lots of teaching went on in the homes, not just your children, but if the neighbor children wanted to come in that was alright too. The Robinson Schoolhouse is the first one I have a date on. It was in 1850, and there were other schools besides that, but I don’t have exact dates on it. This Robinson Schoolhouse, it states that it was where the Mt. Zion Baptist Church and Roane College later stood. Did you know that the Wheat community had a Roane College before we had a Roane College?
Don Watson: It was a four year accredited.
Dorathy Moneymaker: Yeah, a four year accredited college. Also our high school, when it became a high school it was one of the accredited schools. Many of the people and I will not name neighborhoods that had schools, but they were not qualified. So people would come to Wheat and go to school so that they could get into college. You know where that church is, most of you will, if you don’t you need to drive down that direction and see it. Since all the pine trees have died, it’s not hard to see. You go up that driveway to the church, now you can’t know about it unless you have been there. We have a Homecoming the first Sunday in October of every year. And you can get in there then, but you go up to the top of the hill and instead of turning to the left where the church is, you turn to the right and go out on the top of the hill, which you can’t do now because it is covered with trees, but out there is where the Roane College was, but some of the other schools was in a close connection, it was just Roane College and it was as Don said, accredited. It eventually, now, it had no state help until it become Wheat High School. Then Roane College moved into the Wheat High School building and it ceased to exist. I’m going to tell you where the high school sat. You know where Blair Road is? And the Turnpike, before you get to that Blair Road light you are going through the football field of the Wheat High School. The school sat in the corner of Blair Road at that right and the Turnpike. For a long time it sat there. Then it was torn down. I think some of the steps are still there, but anyways that’s where it was, but it grew gradually, I can remember when they add to it. We had a Delco, thing-a-ma-jig that had water in the school, before we got regular sewage and so forth. The school sat where I told you there in that corner. Just across there on the other side is where my grandmother and grandfather lived there. He was a rural delivery mailman. For years and years. I forgot how long, I think I wrote it down somewhere. You see my memory isn’t getting short, I just that I know so much it is hard to remember. (Laughter) You see he carried it on horseback. He wouldn’t get off his horse and leave the mail on it. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday he did one route, and on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday he did the other route. The women along the routes would fix him a plate of food and he would sit on the horse and eat it. Let’s see. Back to that Roane College though. It was a two story house when it was built. They had been Poplar Creek Seminary before that in 1877, and W.H. Crawford, well, he was the president and teacher of the Poplar Creek Seminary, but he was also a Common Presbyterian preacher. He went to Washington College and then there was talking about land being given. A Pyatt couple gave land in 1878, George and Lucinda McKinney-Jones donated 100 acres in 1879. All denominations were involved in all the schools and all the churches. Let me tell you how we had churches back then. We had two buildings and three denominations. Now, if you know where the turn off to Lenoir City is down there, across from there you will see a marker where the Presbyterian Church sat. My maternal grandfather gave the land for that, but it was used for dangerous materials during the war, and so it had to be torn down. On the first Sunday in every month, we met at the Baptist Church, that one that is still standing, and had Sunday school all denominations and those that didn’t even have the Lord. Didn’t have nowhere to go, no television to watch, so they all came to church. The Baptist preacher would come and preach. Then the second Sunday in the month, we would meet out at the Common Presbyterian Church, all of us had Sunday school. Then we would have the Common Presbyterian preacher to preach. He usually lived in Oliver Springs. He had a church in Oliver Springs, Coalfield, Wheat, and Lawnville. That was the other one. On the fifth Sundays, he went to Scarboro and had church. But anyway, the third Sunday in the month, the Wheat community went back to the Baptist Church and had Sunday school. Oh, and by the way, it didn’t matter whether your Sunday school teacher was of the same denomination your family was or not. We didn’t ask them, and didn’t know to ask them. We would have Sunday school. We didn’t have any preacher that Sunday. So, us young’uns enjoyed it more than anything else because we got out and played together while the parents gossiped with each other. And then on the fourth Sunday we went back to the Common Presbyterian Church and after Sunday school the Methodist minister preached. Now for my life, I can’t remember what we did on the fifth Sundays, but I am sure we had Sunday school. I can’t say what church we met in, I don’t know who even decided it, but any way we had it. Are you about ready for me to shut up?
Patricia Clark: I’m going to let Bill tell something about the housing that the college provided for people. I thought that was very interesting in your book Dorathy.
Dorathy Moneymaker: Only thing is he is so much younger than me, he can’t know much.
Bill Driscoll: I agree. Now, I was 12 years old when we left there. So, she can have permission to correct me anytime that she wants to. Now, Patricia asked me to mention that I had lived in a lot of the properties that were at the time owned by Roane county and Wheat High School, but had been built and owned by Roane College. My mother was a divorcee and at the time of her divorce she moved the five of us children back to Wheat. My father remarried and remained in the Rockwood vicinity. This was right in the middle of the Depression. It was a hard time. We moved back to an old house that was owned by William West Williams. Snyder Roberts is a friend of mine, former historian in Roane County, and I am going to give you some of his speculations later about some of the places I had lived, but after a short period in this older house, we moved down to the boys dormitory. Now, that is five people living in a 12 room house. It had not been built the ordinary way. It was built as a dormitory. And I have talked with people when it was really a dormitory. Big rooms, four rooms downstairs here, four rooms upstairs, and then four rooms going back to the back. It was a tremendously big place, but across the yard was a house that had been built by George Jones. Now, if you get one name about Wheat, George Jones is the name and he was a very wealthy man evidently, gave a lot of property, so we got the privilege to live across the street. Now, my grandmother Driscoll, Jeanie Driscoll, and all these people know Jeanie Driscoll, she was an invalid and lived close to the road. As they would pass by, a lot of people would stop and talk to her. Jeanie Driscoll had lived in the boarding house, and I’ve told you that we lived in the boarding house and later the better house over, smaller house, but better house. You know when you get old, and you’re not this old yet, when you get old you tell the same stories over and over. My aunt Jeanie Driscoll would tell this story about living in the dormitory. My father Charlie was very young. This was the coldest house I have ever lived in. I don’t think it had a bit of insulation. The water would freeze in the bucket, in the drinking bucket. My father would warm by the fire and then run up the stairs and jump in the bed, trying to still be warm when he got in there. He’d started his run one night, Jeanie Driscoll told me over and over, started his run and his mother Jeanie said, “Charlie”, and she heard this big bang and said, “I moved the bed!” (Laughter) He had gone up stairs and jumped into the wall. (Laughter) That was her favorite story. My mother worked in the school and she would be honored that Joe said she was the dietician. I like that Joe. They never heard of that term. What she really did was take food and Joe said they brought food; everybody brought food, barter system. You get tickets for how much food you brought. And that was the way; it must have been real hard record keeping. But I remember it was a real good lunch room. I enjoyed eating there and I worked in the lunch room and we also as a family served as custodians, either officially or unofficially of George Jones Memorial Church. We were connected all the way. Now Snyder Roberts, I’ve mentioned and I’m not going to take too much time here, but Snyder Roberts had a theory because of where Jeanie Driscoll and William Driscoll’s home was built and where Roane College was and their policy at Roane College would let teachers build on their property, or in his case William Driscoll at some time in his lifespan had been the overseer of that farm that Joe Magill talked about. His theory was that Jeanie Driscoll’s home had been built on the Roane College property and if you know where Roane College property was, a few hundred yards out the ridge, was the place that we are talking about. We lived on the Wheat property and one disadvantage that we had; you know most people owned property we didn’t own any property. My sister Dot, Dorothy Driscoll, had moved to Clinton and that’s how we all ended up in Clinton. My mother died in 1946, and my older sisters kept us all together and remember my brother and I were just 12 and nine years old at the time. Now, since we lived on school property, people felt free as they came back, live in Knoxville and come back and picked blackberries on the school farm.
We had an uncle who was famous in a different kind of way, I guess. Do you remember Pickle Fritz? Pickle Fritz traveled with the circus and was advertised as the biggest fat man. I remember we as children had to take our seesaw down and put a platform on it for Pickle to have a sit, so he could have a seat and not break down the chairs. The fair, since I lived on school property, when the fair came back each year, and I was there. Twelve years old and younger, and my uncle Jim decided one year he’d enter me in one of the contests. They had the prettiest girl, meanest boy, and ugliest man, penny a vote, and you know you have seen that kind of thing done. My uncle Jim said I won by a landslide, but they had a hard time convincing me that it was an honor to be chosen as the meanest boy in Wheat. But I hold that distinction, that’s one thing, and Chester Watson was chosen as the ugliest man.
You know the fair holds fond memories, and probably all these people came to the fair and you know it was a big fair, they had a fair barn, the school was open, it was a big time. Now, Charlie Mary was one of my real friends as a youngster. The Mary family and Alan’s not here or he would be a big part of this. The Mary family stayed on in Oak Ridge. Charlie Mary had been a part of George Jones Memorial and stayed on in Oak Ridge. He became a guard, in fact captain of the guard force down there. Alan, and his father, and Bonita here, and a lot of these people up here have kept the Wheat Reunion going and the pictures that you can see back in the back.
One more thing and I’ll close; it asks a questions and Patricia when she sent this out, “What was your reaction to the announcement of the Atomic Bomb?” Now, I have a peculiar situation there. I had gone to Oak Ridge to work in the cafeteria, and I maybe wasn’t quite old enough, but I got a job there anyway, Wheat Colony Cafeteria. If you go down in the Wheat community you would have a hard time believing that there were trailers, there were huts, and all down there enough to have a cafeteria and the people of course worked over in the plants. The Wheat Colony Cafeteria was where I was working and I was staying with my Uncle Charlie. The paper came out, The Knoxville papers came out with the whole spiel about the atomic bomb and I couldn’t comprehend that. I mean, it was too much. We sat on the home, it was Don Watson’s family home and we could see the glass building and mile long building, saying that’s where the atomic bomb [came from]. And we were relieved to learn that all of it hadn’t been made there, and there wouldn’t be any explosion there, but it was a real sobering kind of thing to sit there, and look where what we thought the atomic bomb was build there. It ended up it wasn’t all built there, but the glass building, the mile long building would mean a lot to some of you, I think.
Patricia Clark: Well, thank you, Bill. I won’t have to ask you my question later about the bomb. That was going to come later.
Bill Driscoll: OK.
Patricia Clark: Don, Oak Ridge has quite a sports reputation and I understand that Wheat did also. Could you tell us a little bit about sports in Wheat?
Don Watson: I would like to clarify one thing first that I can’t tell a lie. I’m not 80. I’m nearly 83. So, she isn’t much ahead of me. (Laughter) I want to tell one thing about her, she is feisty. She was feisty when she was young. I remember my father was very stern and she came to spend the night with my sister. It was summer and we had one of those wind up Victrolas in the parlor we called it. We had a nine room house, ‘cause there are nine boys and one girl in my family, and I was the youngest, but she was visiting my sister and she was out on the front porch doing the Charleston. My father came up, he looked very sternly and said, “Young Lady, you are welcome to visit our home any time you wish, but there will be no dancing.” So, she quite dancing. But she’s still feisty. (Laughter) But, getting back to the athletics of the schools. I don’t remember back the earliest part because when I was in school I started in 1924 in school. We had outdoor basketball; we had no electricity at all. About three or four years later we had had an outside gymnasium built, I say an outside one, it was a structure we used also for the fairs. Then the lightning hit that and burned it down. The county built an addition to our school and we had Delco lights, and the opposing teams would say that every time they had the ball when we played a basketball game, we’d cut the power down and they couldn’t see the goals. But that wasn’t the truth, we were just better than they were. We had some good football teams back in the earlier days. We had a coach that come there from Florida and he brought about five or six husky guys with him. I don’t know where they came from, they must have been ringers. But they had a championship team that year in football. We didn’t have enough boys in our school, as a rule to play football. But Bonita’s brother, Marvin Stonecipher, who later was the captain of the police force here in Oak Ridge during the war. But he was a good player. At one of the football games at Copper Hill, at night, now he was ahead of me, about four years older than me, I wasn’t playing at the time, he kicked the football from the back of the end zone and the lights were not too good, it was the first year they had lights. That safety man was back looking for the ball and finally he saw it and it bounced all the way across the goal line, 125 yards. I have a record of it that if they had put it in the books it would have been the record of world’s longest kick.
Dorathy Moneymaker: What about that time that he kicked one in Tennessee and ended up all the way in Alabama? (Laughter)
Don Watson: Now, I don’t lie like that. (Laughter) I don’t tell lies like that. But anyway, a few times we didn’t have enough to play football. My dad said I had enough work to do at home that I didn’t need to exercise playing sports. But most the time we played it in the afternoon and I didn’t tell him I played until one time I came home with a big puffed eye. He looked at it and said, “What happened?” I said, “I ran into a fellow”. The next day I picked up potatoes all day long and I’d drop down and that eye would flip back and forth, and then Sunday morning I went to church and then back to school on Monday. I developed a headache. The coach took me home. My dad took me to the doctor, and said I had a concussion, leave him in bed for a couple, three days. Next morning I was in convulsions, they rushed me back to the hospital and I had a compound skull fracture and a blood clot and had to be operated on. My dad never forgave me for playing football, but two years later I went back and played again. As far as sports are concerned. Most the time, after we got our gymnasium we had pretty a fair basketball, boys and girls. In 1936, the year I graduated there were seven of us seniors on the team and one junior, had 22 games we won and lost one, then we went to the district tournament, and we lost in the finals to a team of Harriman that we had beaten twice during the season. I have a picture back there that was taken 55 years later. All of us were there. The full team plus the whole class. There were nine boys and nine girls in our graduating class. Since then there are only three boys left and I happen to be one of the lucky ones.
I’m going to tell just a little bit about the school. My mother was a teacher. She had migrated from Knoxville County and was a teacher in Roane College in 1894, and married my father who had lived there for about four or five generations. And his name was George Jones Watson. His great-uncle was George Jones by marriage because George Jones’ wife was related to my family. I found out over there that he must be kin to me too ‘cause my grandmother was a McKinney, Arta Lisa McKinney. So, my connections, most everybody intermingled and became related someway in that community because they had nowhere else to go. (Laughter) Anyways we had some good football teams. After that, I left in ‘36, I lost track of a lot. They had six-man football. If you’ll look in the Wheat museum there is a picture of a six-man football team. I wasn’t on it because I was gone. I was in the service from ‘42 to ‘46.
Speaking of the atomic bomb, I am very proud of that because I was in Europe and been there two years and were just on the verge of being shipped to Japan. And the news of the atomic bomb stopped us from going to there. I might not be here today to blabber to you on all these things I’m saying. But anyway, I am proud that we had the atomic bomb. I think that we still need to be prepared, whether or not we use it. I don’t think we should ever use it unless necessary, but I hope we’ll always have it in case we do have it, because many lives were saved because of the atomic bomb, of not only the American soldiers, but of the Japanese soldiers and their civilians.
Patricia Clark: Thank you Don. Because I want to get one more person in before the break. You’re bringing in the war, I would like for Bonita to show and tell what she brought this morning. Bill maybe you could help her.
Bill Driscoll: I can try. You want me to help you? Maybe Don can hold one side.
Bonita Irwin: Sometimes we wonder why we-
Patricia Clark: Excuse me, if you could get the microphone.
Bonita Irwin: Sometimes we wonder why we had to leave our homes in Wheat, the community that we loved dearly, and the friends that we parted with they’re scattered everywhere. We don’t know where some of them is even. We try to contact them at Homecoming time, but it’s just impossible to reach them all. This is boys that was called into the service. There are 157 names on there, and I’m sure that we probably missed some, hoped we didn’t, but there is a name on each star, and I guess we was real lucky to not lose any more boys than we did. We lost nine of our precious boys in the war. The lady that started this flag, had the forethought about her to do this, and we are so proud that she did. The flag that she done, wore out and about two years ago I redone the flag, but we are proud of our boys and many of them gone on to be, to be with the Lord now, but we are really proud of them. That is really why we are here today. That’s why we lost our community.
Patricia Clark: I would like to thank the panelists so far. We’ll have about a five to seven minute break, and that will give you time to look at some of the pictures in the back. We will be back at 11 o’clock.
[Break in video]
Patricia Clark: We are going to have to hear from the other side of the panel in the next portion of this program. And before we do, I would like to read something to you on making the site selection of Oak Ridge. I don’t know whether all our Wheat friends know this story, but this is another story I borrowed from Dorathy’s book, “Let’s Call it Wheat.” Her brother-in-law Berlin C. Moneymaker was the chief of the geological branch of TVA and he “had been instructed to find a site meeting these conditions: a large area accessible by rail; thinly populated; a relatively short distance of a sizeable city, but not too close; easily controlled; a natural boundary, a river or ridge desirable.” He further went on to say that two areas came to mind: the Roane County Site, which included Wheat, Bethel Valley, and Bear Creek Valley, and another site in Rhea County. Stone and Webster Engineers and the Army representatives who toured these sites with Mr. Moneymaker, then made the final selection of the Roane-Anderson Site. So, that was a Moneymaker who put Oak Ridge on the map. Now, I’m going to look to my left, and I think I’ll start at the other end. George just ask you to tell us what you told me about one of the crops grown in Wheat that you helped bring in.
George Stubbs: Pat is talking about the peaches orchards that were in this area. Black Oak Ridge when I was a kid had three peach orchards. They had one, Williams Orchard, and then there was Fib-Hester Orchard. And then the large orchard was Dyllis Orchard. This Dyllis Orchard was a sizable place. A lot of peaches picked there. This harvest was done in the early part of the month of August. In 1936 or ‘37, I got a job as a water boy for a row boss. His name was Paris Hatmaker, and there be about 15 or 20 people in a row crew and they would pick these peaches into these, well, they were bags, a regular bag, it would hold a bushel of peaches. These peaches would be hauled out from the top of K-25 hill, where K-25 is. I’m sure you saw remnants of an orchard there when the plant was being built. They were hauled to Dyllis. Dyllis was the train stop for the L and N, to be the closest place to Wheat. Now, they would haul those peaches there by wagon or any kind of a conveyance they could get. They graded these peaches. This harvest lasted about two weeks. They would grade those peaches night and day and pack them in baskets and load them on refrigerated cars. The L and N would stop there and set off cars, they were refrigerated. They were shipped north, well, I understood, to Detroit and the northern markets there. During the Depression, it was so expensive to ship fruit and people had little money to buy, that they could not keep the orchard going. So, they couldn’t pay the freight on these peaches. So as a result of the Depression, the orchard, I think, went out of business, for all practical purposes, and but they would ship car loads of peaches out of here.
The other thing that I wanted to talk about with this Wheat business. While we were talking about the school. I went to a school outside Wheat, but Don’s sister, Lucille Watson, who I’m happy to say is still living, was a school teacher of mine; Johnny Arle, who passed away Saturday, he was also a teacher, and his wife; Katherine Gallaher, Frankie Pickle, all the teachers that were supplied in the surrounding schools got their education from Wheat School. It evidently was a very good school. It supplied this area with teachers, but my school business, that I was speaking about a minute ago: I went to Oliver Springs, and another little school called Orchard View. Well, the money that I made as being a water boy in the peach orchard I used to buy my books. There was another fellow; he was a black kid, about my age by the name of Moore. He and I carried a three gallon keg of water up to the row boss to where they were working, and carried water. Well, the weather was kind of like it is now. It was very hot. These guys would wash their mouths out, wash out the chewing tobacco, washed their mouth out with water, and they’d get rid of a keg of water, you know, very quickly. We had to go down the hill to a spring, that was the only water sources that were available, and then carry this keg back up to the top of the hill or somewhere along the area, wherever they were working, but it was quite an experience. I’ll give you some idea. The first year I went to high school, I saved money; I picked berries and did some other things. I had eight dollars and something to buy books. That will give you some idea about what the economy was around here. There was little or no money. Don was saying that some people had a water bucket with a dipper; some had a water bucket with a gourd that they used to drink out of. It would generally sit on the back porch. If you were lucky it was a cedar bucket, kept the water quite cool, even on a warm day.
I have been suggested to give something on the recreation around here. There was two places here just inside Oak Ridge. One of them was up on Hilltop. My mom use to call it a roadhouse. And so, the men would gather there mostly on the weekend. They had various types of activities that were entertaining, plus drinking beer and doing cards I guess, and gambling. But I found out here, maybe about 10 years ago, that on the greenbelt back of my house, between Iroquois and Johnson Road, there is a stretch of greenbelt there, that there is a pit there and I met this gentleman from Middle Tennessee, he was head of the TVA group here, and he came up there for some recreation and said, “I want to know where that cockfight pit was.” They had got there in the afternoon, whenever it got a little bit dark they would walk down through the greenbelt. And so it’s still there, there is a pit, just back of my house on greenbelt where they conducted cockfights there. That was one of their recreations. Cockfighting and coon hunting, we had a lot of coon hunters around here, and this always worked out to be on Friday and Saturday night.
Patricia Clark: Eula, you were quite young, would you mind telling us a little about your life in Wheat.
Eula Magill-Cooper: Well, there were five of us children, and I remember the day that Joe was born; Uncle Bill Magill lived with us. And I don’t remember going to my Aunt Dora and Uncle Ben Magill’s, but he came and got us. Told us we had a little baby brother and she and I ran all the way home saying, “He’s going to be mine, he’s going to be mine!” I thought we were poor, but really we were rich, because we had parents that loved us and taught us the way of God. And Joe and Kenneth made a little wagon and they wouldn’t let us girls play with it, so Beulah, Marie and I made us a wagon and you can imagine what that was like. We would build playhouses and go to the woods and get moss for our carpet. We were just blessed in so many, many ways. We played Hoopie-Hide, and Annie-Over, and Hopscotch. We had friends that came home with us from school and would spend the night. I am just thankful that God gave me a good mother and dad.
Patricia Clark: Thank you Eula.
Eula Magill-Cooper: I have just so many memories it would be impossible to tell them all.
Patricia Clark: Well Joe, I’m going to skip you right for the moment and let Barbara tell us about her memories.
Barbara McCall-Ely: As I said, I am Barbara McCall-Ely, but I was kin to everybody in Wheat Community. (Laughter) My Grandmother use to say, “Don’t you say anything bad about anybody ‘cause they’re kin to you.” So, I was kin to the Smiths, the McKinney’s the Sellers, and my aunt married into the Moneymakers. I was kin to everybody. I was even kin to old Don Watson. But I want to tell you something about the closeness of our community. When I was a little kid and Don Watson and all those big fellows were around, you know, little bitty kid, I was the pretty girl that Bill Driscoll was the meanest boy, (Laughter) I was the pretty girl, so anyway and Chet Watson was the ugliest man, but anyway. We all were sort of like a family because there was family connections. Now as Dot said the Moneymakers were only there 10 years. My McCall family was there approximately 10 years. My granddaddy had a peach orchard, but they didn’t live there very long. They were North Carolinians. So, you know. But anyway, I was born into Smith-Sellers family. My mother was Winnie May Sellers, she married Guy McCall, later married Shields Brown in Texas as I told you, but the closeness of our community, my brother and I were raised by grandparents who were 42 and 50-ish. And these, the Cooper boys, the Watson boys, anybody, the Arnold boys and girls, everybody looked after Gene and Barbara McCall. I have an older brother that’s almost two years older than I, but we would go wherever the teenagers went. If they were going if we got a chance to go, we went too. So, we were always the ones that were sticking around various places. So I knew everybody. My granddaddy was superintendent of the Sunday school in the Common Presbyterian, and I don’t know, I guess the Baptist church. I didn’t know if I was Baptist, Common Presbyterian, or Methodist. And I’m still perfectly happy at any service; however, all the preachers preach the same, hell fire and brimstone. And it would scare me, and I’d scrunch up against my granddaddy and say, “Oh Granddaddy, I don’t wanna burn.” You know they said it scared the little children, but I was saved quite young, so I guess it was good. But any way and I am a Baptist.
My grandmother was a Republican, and my granddaddy was a Democrat. One of my grandmother’s folks fought for the North; my granddaddy’s folks fought for the South. So politics or the war or religion, or your politics things were never discussed. Except my granddaddy would say, “I killed your vote Mertle.” So, you know I was raised in a very loving, a very caring family. I was blessed that my great-grandmother Sellers lived with us for seven years of my life. My great-grandfather Stubbs would come and visit from Rockwood quite often after he lost his wife. And he was there lots and he was blind for most of my life. I think I was real small when he went blind. But he had a way of getting around very agilely. Grandpa was not a type that felt sorry for himself. He took his little cane and we could hear him hitting things, but he got around well. He was not messy at eating. And we had a blessing of a long standing, God-fearing generation. My great-great-great- Dorathy, great. I think it was five greats, his name was Micah Sellers, he is in the Tennessee Baptist minister’s book. He started Overton. He preached at George Jones. He was a part all of the community as a whole. My granddaddy, his father, as Dot said, was the mail man. And I’ve been told the reason I like horses so well, my Grandpa Sellers, who I thought was a giant. He was a little bit taller than my granddaddy. So, my Great-Grandpa Sellers would put me up on his horsy with his mail bags and I thoroughly enjoyed that. So they were called Uncle Mike and Aunt Molly. The community and even Bethel Valley knew Uncle Mike and Aunt Molly Sellers. Everybody knew the two of them. My grandmother was a Smith. And then you know, as I said, course we went very seldom to Harriman, but now you remember where there was an old beer joint on Riley and something road, down here and it burned. That was our old Locket’s Store, and Doctor Linus Locket’s dad built that store. And that’s where we came from Wheat to go get the bus to Knoxville. We had to travel there and then we could get a bus at Locket’s Store. Believe me, Mr. Locket did not like anything to do with liquor. So it upset me some when I saw all those liquor signs. Of course I was very angry and my brother was even angrier than I. We were teenagers or close to it and Gene was so angry that he doesn’t even like to come back here anymore because of what the government did. He ended up going in the Navy in 1949 stayed with the Navy for 28 years, and then was a postman like his great-grandfather and grandfather until he retired from the post office out in Oakland, California. And I became a nurse, first of all. I started school in Wheat, left in the fifth grade. Went to Dyllis, went to Cartive, went to Rockwood then sailed to Texas. Got my high school education in Petersburg, Texas, close to Lubbock, Texas. Went to Galveston, Texas for my nursing, started as an aid at the St. Mary’s Hospital in Galveston, Texas, ended up as an LPN three years later, and six years later, I was an RN. I worked, as I said, with juvenile treatment centers most of the time. I did some pediatric nursing and I finished out when I could no longer help control the juvenile treatment children in Texas and Oklahoma because you did have to work very hard with them at times. I ended up at the Briarcliff Nursing Home here in Oak Ridge in 1996. Several years of nursing. I also married one of the best men in the world, I couldn’t have a Tennessean. I guess I should say Alan Murray and I were sort of sweet hearts as little kids, ‘cause we were in the same class, but Alan’s folks didn’t come until we were in the third grade, so we didn’t have too much time ‘cause I left in the fifth grade. Our closeness affairs, our closeness of loving our school and what it meant to us, our families talked about God, education and being something, making something out of yourself. You didn’t live off of welfare. It was a disgrace to go to the poor farm. We didn’t expect to live off of others, but as I said, as the government came and I do not, I must say this, I do not like the bell that you all have in Oak Ridge. I am very unhappy with that bell. When it gongs, I shiver, because we didn’t jump on Japan, they jumped on us. So I don’t like that bell. It shouldn’t be there. Take it up to Washington and let them have it ‘cause they were the ones that took our place. But anyway, that is one of my little things that I have to say to God each day,”Oh Lord let me hear that bell.” And he’s getting better, I’m getting deaf. So I can’t hear it so well, when they gong it. But I certainly haven’t looked at it any more than I had to. I am glad the trees grow up around it some, but anyway I do want to say that I feel like we were not paid well for our farms. Some of our cemeteries are a disgrace. The ones that the government has, now I can say that, they take better care of them then the City of Oak Ridge. Scott-Cabbage cemetery is pitiful looking. The Gallaher cemetery, Welkler-Gallaher, oh they made a big thing out of the slaves. There any colored folks here? Glad you all got a beautiful cemetery ‘cause my Welkler- Gallaher looks pitiful. I do think we were shoved out, put upon and you know it said on the thing, Johnny Qualls is not around, but it said on the deed of his daddy, “When the government is through with your property you can buy it back for the same price”. Johnny’s tried. He didn’t make it. Now I understand one of the Gallaher’s got part of their property back but I understand that’s right, but they paid us very poorly. I don’t even remember, it was way in ‘44 or ‘45 before my granddaddy was paid for his property, or his mother’s property. We were broken up as a family. As Don said, he went off to war and when he came back he couldn’t find his Wheat family. Because we moved from Washington state, Washington DC, some are overseas, but you know, I feel like that there are many, many, many, many, many intelligent people that came from Wheat Community and if you’ll look around and if you think about it, several have still come back home. We even still have some more people coming back home. Bill Driscoll’s cousin, Betty Jane Elsey, is back and living in Kingston. But several of us come back to our mountains, and we are here and we do have a good Homecoming. It’s the first Sunday of October, and this year will be when I graduated 50 years ago from high school. Not here, but I’m going to have a big blast at George Jones Baptist Church. People have trouble knowing where George Jones Baptist Church is, if you go far enough down 95, you’ll find it. It’s up on the right hand side, you can’t miss it. It has a cemetery. That is the only other building left in our community since Locket’s Store was burned down. Our church, our Common Presbyterian church wasn’t torn down it was burned down, but we do have the monument.
[Break in video]
Barbara McCall-Ely: I just want to say that my Wheat Folks, and John Ernest Arnold, is one of the older ones. Bud Adams is older than John Ernest who’s still living, but we don’t have too many of our old group, it’s left up much like Dorathy, Don, Bonita, and then there is the bunch that were in the fifth grade and below that there aren’t too many people that come to Homecoming. I wish we could get more of them. But anyway, our closeness was we had dinners. Dot said she didn’t know what we did on the fifth Sunday; well, the fifth Sunday was a big dinner, on the ground at George Jones Baptist Church. I can remember during revivals and they had them three weeks and I would be put on a pallet in the back of George Jones Baptist Church and I would go to sleep because I was little and most anybody they watched all of us. But we had a downstairs at that time, course do to the vandals thinking it was a ghost church, they vandalize our church all the time. We can’t even put windows in there because they break them out. We can’t put lights in there because they break them out. Apparently they think this is a terrible place. But anyways, we do cherish what we have left. When I left home, I have never been back; I have never seen my home place. Men in the government say, “We’ll take you”. Well, I’ll wait and see when they do, but when God takes me to Heaven, He’ll let me pass by the Sellers home place, but anyway I have had many good times, I did not know of being jealous of anyone. They tell me know that I am grown that Smith Sellers family was rich. I did not know that. I knew my grandmother and granddaddy shared with others, but I didn’t know we were rich. Jack Rather would come and gather wheat. He had a combine. Everybody would come for hog killings and the hogs were shared. I can remember my granddaddy; because it was Depression he would give Dr. Hecker from Oliver Springs a ham or bacon for treating us children because he didn’t have the money to pay for it. But Dr. Hecker couldn’t by ham and bacon because he lived in Oliver Springs. So there were so many things, there was a closeness about us. If somebody died everybody was there for you; if someone was sick everybody took care of the crops; if somebody was just having trouble with families, as I said, I was from a divorced family and that was bad in 1930’s, but the Watsons, the Arnolds, the Stoneciphers, the McKinney’s; many, many people looked after us. I want to tell you one funny thing. Ms. Effie Driscoll, I can’t leave without telling you about her, she was a first grade teacher. Well, Mr. Don Watson and my Lee Alan Arnold, who’s gone now, were going into her grade, and you know, they always say that children cry when they first go to school. Well, Ms. Effie started crying, saying, “Here come’s Don and Lee Alan. I’m never going to live through this year.”
Patricia Clark: Thank you, Barbara. We have reached the end of our time. I do want to mention the Crossroad’s Tavern that Barbara mentioned as being the bus stop is actually in Grove Center. So they had to come from Wheat to Robertsville to get to Knoxville.
Joe Magill: Let me tell you about how Oak Ridge came to be. Senator McClellan was head of the Ways and Means Committee, and President Roosevelt came to him and said, “I need some money, a large amount of money to build a secret project.” He said, “Mr. President, where in Tennessee do you want to build it?” (Laughter)
Patricia Clark: That is a good note to close on, Joe. I did want to announce, well, next week we have the Anderson County communities, Robertsville and Scarboro people will be here with us. These sessions are being taped, videotaped, and we will have them available in the ORICL Office if you want to check any out that you missed. I also would like to put in a plug for the museum. This is a marvelous resource, and the fact that they let us use their facilities. I am a volunteer here on Wednesday afternoons and it’s a wonderful place to come and work. We have people from all over the world who come and see this museum and actually plan to come here as an end destination. So if you have any time or would like to visit with people, and the museum staff is wonderful, so I would like to put in a plug for their volunteer contingence because they do need more volunteers. Thank you for coming and we will see you next week. (Applause)
[Break in video]
Bonita Irwin: I have a grade card from the old Roane College. E.W. McKinney, some of you may know him; it’s his grade card. There have been different ones to ask me what subjects they taught and so on. And I’ll just run through some of them: English, Math, History, Latin, Physical Geography, Agriculture, Physics, Trigonometry, Spanish, Chemistry, Zoology, English Literature, American Literature, Higher Algebra, Botany, Political Economics, Sociology, and General History, and one of his grades is, he got a double A in chemistry, a B is the lowest that he got. And Political Economics he got a double A, and the rest of them is A’s. So this is the application for the Tennessee professionals. It’s a professional certificate.
Patricia Clark: I just want to say if Dorathy is the historian of Wheat then the collector and curator of the memorabilia is Bonita. (Laughter, Applause)
[End of Video]